What and How are Learning Activities?

THE saying `Learning by doing’ is still very popular in today’s educational world. In fact, learning activities such as reading an article, watching a film, taking notes on a teacher’s lecture, writing an essay, researching a topic in the library, and leading a class discussion are experiences designed to involve students in thinking about and using subject matter in the simple reason that specific facts, generalizations, and concepts do not encourage students to think or develop social and academic skills. Learning objectives are primarily achieved by how the primary content is translated into learnable tasks for students in the classroom, in other words, by the kinds of learning activities in which the teacher engages his students. All these activities represent things that can be done by students without teachers, appropriately depending on the intellectual and emotional development of the students involved, the nature of the subject matter, and the objectives that the teacher and students want to attain.

There are many factors that a teacher should take into account when designing learning activities.

Each learning activity must serve a specific objective; otherwise, it will be merely busy work. Learning activities have to be planned for further multiple objectives. They need to be open-ended so that they can encourage a variety of responses differing in quality and quantity. The learning activities ought to help students learn how to find answers for themselves rather than provide the answers.

They had better proceed from the simple, concrete and specific to the more complex and abstract. Also, those activities will enable students to apply what they have learned in some situations to other new and different ones. Lastly, they served various functions best.

Learning activities are of four categories. Firstly, intake activities are essential for students since they must have information to work with or think about before they can be expected to engage in intelligent action. For example, reading books, articles, magazines, newspapers or advertisements; observing experiments, films, pictures, drawings or television; listening to lectures, records, discussions or the radio; touching objects, nature or the environment; interviewing parents or other adults; and tasting foods or liquids. Secondly, organizational activities help students to draw the material to which they have been imposed. For example, note-taking, arranging, graphing, mapping, writing, summarising, experimenting, identifying, question-asking and answering.

Thirdly, demonstrative activities make students show what they have learned so as to display the skills they possess and prove how well they can think. For example, discussing, writing, describing, applying, reporting, analyzing, and question asking. Finally, expressive activities encourage students to illustrate themselves by creating or producing an original product, for example, solving, inventing newly used things, composing poetry, writing essays, painting, discussing, and role-playing. In too many classrooms, students are encouraged, for the most part, to participate in the same kind of learning activities every day. They listen to teachers talk, read, and write. However, different students learn in diverse ways. All four types of activities are necessary if learning is to take place.

If students are to take part successfully in learning activities, they will need to master a wide range of skills that will help them learn. Such skills fall into three categories, namely academic skills, social skills, and thinking skills. Academic skills include reading, viewing, listening, outlining, note-taking, caption-writing, making charts, reading and interpreting maps, diagramming, tabulating, constructing timelines, and asking relevant questions. For instance, on reading and interpreting maps, finding places on a map, determining distance on a map, using a map to locate places, using simple terms of direction, using a map key and scale, interpreting the information found on different sorts of maps; construct a simple map; compare and contrast the information to be found on two maps of the same area. Social skills include planning with others, participating in research projects, participating productively in group discussions, responding courteously to the questions of others, leading group discussions, acting responsibly, and helping others.

For instance, when participating in research projects, make a committee effort to research a problem of common concern or work in small groups of two or three to investigate a particular topic.

Thinking skills include the following.

1) Observing: Students must be brought into contact with data before they can do anything with it, getting opportunities to read, view, taste, hear, feel, smell, touch or participate. The teacher makes students involved in as many kinds of experiences as possible, offering a focus, not the structure, that the students are expected to observe.

2) Describing: Once students have been motivated to engage in experiences, they must be encountered or asked to describe the characteristics which they have observed, where care should be taken to ensure that the students report their own rather than the teacher’s perceptions.

3) Comparing and contrasting: Students cannot understand objects, ideas, events and so on clearly unless they are able to compare and contrast these phenomena in terms of similarities and differences. To do so, the teacher can ask them to study similar aspects of previously unrelated content and then ask identical questions about this content.

4) Developing concepts: Students form concepts from different observations or identifications being sorted into a meaningful set of categories so as to make some sense of order or pattern out of diversity, identify the common characteristics of the items in a group, label the groups they have formed, subsume additional items that they have listed under those labels and recombine items to form new groups.

5) Differentiating and defining: Students determine what attributes or characteristics they need to look for in order to decide whether particular examples are or are not instances of a concept. To broaden and deepen a student’s understanding of a concept, examples that contain new attributes not included in the original definition must be presented by asking them to compare these new examples with the ones they knew already.

6) Generalizing: Students suggest a relationship among several concepts, especially for warranted suggestions, looking at two or more different samples of content, explaining the data they have obtained and generalizing through carefully thought-out or sequenced questions.

7) Predicting and explaining: Students state reasons for various occurrences, making inferences based on their application of an idea they have previously formed as to what might happen in a new situation and explaining why they think this would happen.

8) Hypothesizing: A hypothesis is a prediction offered in order to provide a basis for further investigation or a key ingredient in the development of insights or central in the process of reflective thinking or investigating a problem in which students are interested.

9) Offering alternatives: Teachers offer alternative suggestions or possibilities in the foregoing strategies. Of course, learning activities do nothing but more than a simple teaching-learning process. Theoretically speaking, students are interested in their studies only when they find them essential to their future education, and the educational objectives established will come to an end only if students think they need their studies for any reason. Herein, learning activities play a fundamental role in drawing students’ attention to their studies and achieving the successful accomplishment of an education system. Out of the diverse learning styles students tend to have, they are given to do well in their studies more than usual with the help of learning activities, that is, bodily-kinesthetic learning style. So, let’s learn by doing only as much as possible.

Source- The Global New Light of Myanmar